SkyDrive Pro apps for Windows 8 and iOS

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro apps for Windows 8 and iOS are now available in the Windows Store and App Store respectively for SharePoint Online users in Office 365. After signing in to your Office 365 account, you can access, view, and upload your documents from anywhere.

You can use the SkyDrive Pro apps to view documents in your SkyDrive Pro folder, select specific content to take offline when you are traveling or have low bandwidth, organize your content by creating new folders, and upload new content and share with others.

You would have thought it might have crossed their minds to add functionality to allow the customers who have spent 10’s of thousands of pounds on the latest sharepoint licenses and prefer on site hosting.

Hey Microsoft! Were over here! The enterprise customers who have paid your bills for the last 20 years!

Hi, this is Mark Kashman, author of post and Senior Product Manager for SharePoint @ Microsoft. We care deeply for on-premises customers and their use and access to/from SharePoint. We focused SkyDrive Pro v1 apps’ authentication on our known Office 365 cloud model. We do plan to support on-premises configurations to enable access from the SkyDrive Pro apps in the future. We are getting started in the apps world with a strong cross-platform approach, and consistently working on feature updates. We hear you.

This is great Mark! Any idea when can we expect a version that supports on premise deployments ( and hopefully one which maintains the SP 2010 compatibility like the current desktop version)? Also, do you have any timelines on the Android version?
Thanks!

Nice one and you are absolutely correct.
Microsoft way… Develop without getting "real users" requirements (development team involved first) then make the users involve and then make fixes and delay in new version and if the version do come out they are not meeting user acceptance, incompatible, etc which means more fixes. A classic example is the Visual Studio 2012 project can not be open in Visual Studio 2010 (what is the point of IL!!! There is no conversion wizard either!! It is easier to do it manually by coping the code from the designer into a new form and then the code for the front-end events and routine.

Apple way… "Real Users" involvement with and without technical background and then requirements derived from the users’ need, and then passed to development team to make the product so the design meet the user acceptance. I am looking at the designs of iPAD (vs Surface), iPhones etc

Hi, thanks for releasing the new app. I have a couple of questions I hope you can answer:
1) how do you configure the app to synchronize document from multiple libraries within your tenant?
2) how do you connect the app to multiple tenants?
3) clicking on the "sync" button within the tenant results in an error if you only have the app installed (and not the SkyDrive pro client). how do I resolve this?

Answers: 1) The app only synchronizes with your default SharePoint Online-based SkyDrive Pro folder. It cannot be pointed at any other team site document libraries. You can do this for Windows 7 or 8 desktop with the SkyDrive Pro Sync for Windows: http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/05/21/skydrive-pro-client-for-windows-now-available.aspx. 2) The app only supports connection to a single tenant, aka – a single user’s SkyDrive Pro folder. 3) You can install the standalone SDP sync client (in same link as #2) or if you install Office 2013, this same component comes as a part of that same install.

I tried to login from the Windows 8 App to my Office 365 environment using my AD federated account (the same that I use for the Lync App), but the system gives me the error "Sorry, there is no SkyDrive Pro experience available for you at this time. Please contact your administrator for further information".

It would be nice if MS would create apps with Office 365 Dedicated in mind. Not all of their customers are on the Shared environment and it cant be that hard to code domain authentication credentials into these apps.